Rick Francona

Rick Francona (31 August 1951-) was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the US Air Force and a veteran of the Vietnam War and Gulf War.

Biography
Rick Francona was born in New Brighton, Pennsylvania in 1951, and he served in the US Air Force from 1970 to 1998. From 1970 to 1973, he worked as a Vietnamese linguist during the Vietnam War, and he flew combat missions over Vietnam and Laos. Most of his career was spent in the Middle East, and he became a fluent Arabic speaker; he assisted in the evacuation of the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1976, served as an adviser to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, and was the chief interpreter for the Gulf War ceasefire talks at Safwan in 1991. From 1992 to 1995, he lived in Damascus, Syria as the USA's first air attache to the Syrian government. In 1997, he led a special operations team supporting the NATO forces during the Bosnian War. He retired in 1998, and he became a media military analyst and commentator for NBC News, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Radio Canada, and CNN.